Other shows will strictly forbid generating copies to drives not owned by the production - so be sure to find out before backing up to your own storage. Some clients don't mind if you make an initial verified copy to storage not owned by the production, especially if camera media cards are at a premium on the day, because it will ultimately get the cards back to camera faster so they can be used again. Several modules exist which allow direct insertion of proprietary camera media from RED, Sony, and others into the enclosure, saving you an additional all-important peripheral port on your computer. Using Thunderbolt 3, these flexible enclosures can handle media offloading and backup, footage ingest for post, as well as transform commodity SSDs into a blazingly fast new form of removable media. Now, with their new G-Speed ShuttleXL enclosures and EV Series bay adapters, the range of tasks these rugged storage appliances can handle has greatly expanded. Their G-Speed multi-bay enclosures have always provided rugged, reliable and redundant data storage for productions of all levels and budgets. Their storage products have been a near-ubiquitous sight on sets for many years. One option is the range of G-Speed enclosures from G-Technology. If you ask why these particular drives were purchased, you'll often hear that "they say 'backup' right on them," or "they were the cheapest." Suddenly, having fast interim, or what I call depot, storage doesn't seem like such a bad idea. In this bag, you'll often find a couple of hard drives emblazoned with words like green or eco-friendly, both of which are code for low or variable spindle speed, themselves code for slow. I say "often" because it's not unusual, at a certain budget level of production, to be greeted upon one's arrival to set with a plastic bag (often bearing the logo of a big box retail chain that rhymes with "Vest Guy") being handed to you by someone getting paid even less than you. It can often save time and speed up getting the camera media ready to record again to make an initial (verified) backup to one's own fast, local storage and begin the (often) slower copy to the drives provided by production. Many DITs will bring their own fast storage to set. It doesn't matter what system you use, as long as everyone agrees and there is no confusion. a red bin on the left-hand side and a green bin on the right side). Others put nothing on the cards themselves, since tape or residue can foul a camera's media bay, and use colored bins on opposite sides of a cart or table for this (i.e. Some people use colored camera or gaffer's tape for this (for example, red tape applied to cards that have not been backed up and green tape for cards that are OK to format). When working on set as a Media Manager, or DIT - though we like to think of a DIT's purview as encompassing a broader, more interesting range of tasks - one of the most important things, other than actually making the backups themselves, is having a system that you and the camera assistants agree on to distinguish media that is ready to be formatted in the camera from media that has camera original footage on it that may or may not have been backed up. Let's take this opportunity to review what we see as an established set of practices for media offload, handling and backup on set. Part of the Media Manager's job is to make backing up camera media a boring task, one characterized by a total and complete lack of drama and requiring little to no interaction from other members of the camera department or larger crew. In the grand tradition of filmmaking - which is to say, giving a job with an incredibly high level of responsibility to one of the lowest paid positions on set (see: loader) - media management can be a great way to get on set, or at least near it if you're starting out in the industry (even if that's a "temporary offload location" set up inside an establishment whose name begin with "Star" and ends with "bucks"). Media management might seem like a boring topic.
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